A Sunday walk...

 

With the amount of local walking we did during Lockdown 1, combined with the less tempting weather at this time of year, it’s not been the easiest thing to come up with interesting places to walk this time around.  Clearly we have no reason to use the car as we do have plentiful areas to walk locally, even if we HAVE walked around most of them time and time again in the past 10 months! Today though after a brief discussion we decided to head to Churchgate Street - one of the villages on the outskirts of the town. It’s a lovely little village and feels quite removed from Harlow itself, and is also slightly too far to venture on one of our routine morning walks on weekdays, so a slightly longer leg-stretch in that direction today seemed to fit the bill. 

By the time we headed out (after a rather tasty lunch of beef stew cooked in the slow cooker overnight, with dumplings) it had turned into a quite nice day with the sun just peeking through. It was also quite a lot warmer than the last week has been too which made a nice change. We headed out on a pretty standard route towards the Tesco at Church Langley for MrEH to buy his newspaper, and then remembered that the old route we would have used to get from there to Churchgate Street is currently partly inaccessible due to the building works for the new parts of Newhall, so we needed to come up with an alternative. Handily MrEH thought he knew a path which might work, and a quick check on the map confirmed this, so off we went...

Up to the top of Newhall and past the Roundhouse was easy enough, but there is a short - about quarter of a mile - gap in made up paths and roads across the fields that divide the New Town and its offshoots from the older village of a Churchgate Street, and although there is a footpath, there has been a LOT of rain this week! The photo above is one of the drier sections...

Eventually though we found our way to the roadway that MrEH had been aiming us for, and from there it was all solid underfoot, which was a relief! The spire of the church itself is a bit of a local landmark - rather like the water tower (which also appeared in clear view across the field while we were battling the mud!) it’s visible across a surprising amount of the town. The picture at the top of the post shows you more clearly what the church looks like - it’s a lovely building which was rebuilt in 1870 after its much older predecessor suffered a fire.

A nice just-over 6 miles walked today, taking me to over 80 miles walked so far this month. This week will be morning walks as usual - mostly 4 - 6 miles each, with an additional walk into town one day as there is an item I need that I can’t get from our local shops. Hopefully I’ll be able to order in advance so I will just have to walk in and collect this, but otherwise it won’t take me long to pick it up in store. Other than that the week will be mostly “Staying at home” unsurprisingly! 

Robyn